


But Colours It, And Corners Had

by Thimblerig



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Arthurian Mythos, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Regency, Alternate Universe - Western, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Weird Arty Stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-22 01:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8267789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: Look, Ma, no canon!1 Tournament: Sylvie, Porthos, Ninon - "Punk"2 Ghost Cops: Samara, Aramis, Alice - "A Crack in Everything"3 Western/Chanbara: Athos, Alice, Marcheaux - "Lone Athos and Cub"4 Actors and Playwrights: Athos, Marcheaux, Lemay -  "I'm Not a Villain - I Just Play One on TV"5 Arthurian Romance: Constance, Milady, Grimaud - "Sir Constance and the Red Lady"6 Regency Romance/Gothic: Samara, Tariq, Louis Jr. - "Samara, A Novel"





	1. "Punk"

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from John Donne’s “The Legacy”, because “AU Scramble” lacks euphony. There is no update schedule - prompts will get filled when I get to it.
> 
> (Yes, I am most definitely procrastinating. This was fun to write, though.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: non-graphic amputation and prosthesis.

**“Punk”**

 

_never forget_

_(sylvie)_

You wear your colours always, tiny, bright flowers stitched with scavenged threads adorning the sleeves of your work smock, the golden apples you inherited from your mother hanging from your earlobes and brightening the length of your neck, stolen copper wire twisted into leafy vines that you stitch to your heavy gloves and your toolbelt. At need you use paint and chalk, colour your dungarees with random splashes of brightness - _leaf-ripple and wind-song_ \- and dye streaks into long crimped curls that settle around your shoulders or float in the heavy airflow of the Main Trunk Passage.

You will never be promoted out of Tech-District like this - not at all the right _attitude,_ head in the clouds, probably seditious _just look at her_ \- and you don't care to follow their rules enough to try. At times you wonder how accurate the patterns you make really are, whether the red rose you stitch owes more to the crimson of an LED, if the sun is truly that bright, how much of the unfurling fern-fronds are nature and how much simple geometry… And still you stitch, and paint, and wind sun-wheels into your work, the patterns handed down from your parents, and their parents, the old reminder: flower seeds may shelter in the dark earth, but _flowers grow._   

*

_weight_

_(porthos)_

They're not exactly forbidden, the games, and they're not exactly encouraged, yeah? Everyone has to blow off steam somewhere, techies as much as anyone, and so the pits are allowed to continue, hidden in the dark-and-deep, where the pylons and the turbines and the great machines hold up the weight of the World.

You'd be happy to leave them behind you, as you have left so much: left the darkness and oil-smell for a straight posting in the Guard; become an enforcer of the law instead of… that; left the complications of wheeling around Flea wheeling around Charon for the simpler bonds of brotherhood. But the Captain has a concern about the tournaments - master players are disappearing - and. So.

The back of your neck prickles as you doff the weight of your uniform coat. Flea, crookedly smiling, throws a grubby banyan jacket over you, the worn grey-green brocade flaring as you turn. She offered one of her ancient, precious crow-feathers but you turned her down: the brass hoop in your ear and the worn-in toolbelt, the goggles to protect your sight, they are caste-sign enough. And you walk through the District, hauling your apparatus behind you, looking for the wild places, the hidden places, marked by birds that cannot fly here.

*

_the sign of the wren_

_(ninon)_

You hear tales of your fall, now, the facts distorted and wound into a filigree, into a cautionary tale of the woman who thought she knew the movements of the stars and dared to crack the Roof, Lady Icarus, trying to fly and her burning was inevitable.

They aren't exactly lies, the tales, though you feel they miss the point. But now you dwell in the lowest places, your harmonious salons given up for riotous conclave. You must twist your neck to scan the crowd - the silver daisy that covers your missing eye gives little vision in the low light. The turn-out is good, though you note that you have company, a shaggy-haired man hidden and swathed in rags and scarves, a Mid-Level dandy who kisses the neck of a copper-haired lady while scanning the crowd himself. You know them of old: the game gains complexity.

The players prepare on either side of the buried circle, fussing with their apparatus. Engineuse Bodin tweaks one last bolt with a wrench no larger than her finger and smooths her hand down a shining flank. It is beautiful, her work: a good match of form and function, and the joints flare into engravings of the flowers she loves. A talented girl with a good share of skill though she has yet to gain a drachm of subtlety. Mayhap she'll learn some in this fight. And Monsieur _du Vallon,_ face tense around bird-bright eyes, works silver thimble-cups trailing wires onto his fingertips. He's new here, and not new, somehow. You look forward to seeing his work.

Fueling your voice with a belly of air you pitch yourself to carry over the crowd’s roar and announce the trial of Bodin’s ‘Little Wolf’ against the newcomer du Vallon’s ‘Heavenly Mary’. Some call this mindless entertainment, a pandering to a desire for savagery that dwells in every spirit. But you - you have never seen a better display of both technical skill and an operator's character. You drop a crimson kerchief and with a spine-trembling snarl the bronze flower-wolf leaps into the fray; du Vallon’s silver apparatus shivers into a flock of swirling birds. The crowd howls.  

Your voice will never be silenced. Your school remains open. And down in the dark you find the most _extraordinary_ students.   


	2. "A Crack in Everything"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _And the crack in the tea-cup opens_   
>  _A lane to the land of the dead._
> 
> \- W H Auden

She found her partner in the highest room of the house they shared, where slanting pillars of amber sun leaned down from the tall windows and tiny dust motes danced in the light, the invisible made bright. He was almost hidden in the light and the dust, resting his shoulder against dirty glass. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up his forearms and one wrist rested on a bent knee; wild-haired, he stared out the window to the street.

Trip-trap, Samara’s patent-leather shoes clicked as she crossed the creaking boards, and cast an askance glance through the window: a woman walked down the street under peach trees, her pale hair up in pins, and hand in hand was a child. Golden her hair, the peaches above, the sun on the child… “You need to give this up,” she said.

“I really don't,” answered Aramis.

When she had too much to say Samara, cat-like, usually said nothing at all. She repinned a stray curl and adjusted the veil on her little feathered hat, then informed him, “We've work to do. A haunted widow on King St.”

He smiled crookedly and stood, shrugging into a natty jacket and putting on his fedora with a flourish. “Orders are orders.” He tipped his hat.

***

It was an old house and a cold house, the King St residence, its grey stone set in heavy lines like the face of a hanging judge. Mrs Clerbaux met them at the door. “Call me Alice,” she said, and offered tea in elegant bone china cups poured from silver pot kept steaming by the tealights set beneath it. Her voice, like her smile and eyes, was warm and generous, and she was quietly elegant in pearls and a soft cashmere suit of gentle lavender, with her hair twisted into a smooth knot at the nape of her neck. “It's such a little thing, Miss? Detective Alaman? - I wasn't sure it was even a, well, a thing until I was speaking with Lieutenant Vallon and he was describing the work he did for his old department, and I enquired with Captain Treville and, well, here you are.”

Samara smiled, and took a neat bite from a piece of buttery shortbread. “Here we are.” Alice's eyebrows rose and she looked around the room in curiosity.

“Here we are,” said Aramis from the side of the room where he leaned against a pillar, arms crossed.

“May I ask? I couldn't help but notice your hat. Feathers aren't ‘in’ this season and you are so beautifully dressed otherwise... Lieutenant Vallon kept a little garnish of feathers in his buttonhole - is it like a regimental insignia?”

“In a sense,” said Samara. “Birds are messengers from this world to the next and symbolic value is helpful in our work. In the old days we wore capes of starling feathers,” she added, smiling, and touching the black-rainbow feather in her hat. “it is a little bit of a statement about who we are.” She sipped fragrant tea. “There are some who would prefer to forget that we do what we do so we wear our feathers to say, ‘We will not be swept under the kitchen rug.’” At the unspoken question in Alice's eyes she said, “Porthos - Lieutenant Vallon - could not help you because he lost his partner.” An unhappy frown formed in the widow’s brows and Samara added, “Do not worry, it was a joyous event, though a little fraught with screaming.”

“Like childbirth?” interjected Alice.

“In a sense. Athos is in a better place and we are all very happy for him. But Lieutenant Vallon cannot work with us until he gets a new partner.”

“That seems harsh.”

"A ship cannot sail without the sea. And what is your problem, exactly, Alice?”

Alice looked down at the teapot where the candles beneath it had flickered out. “That, mostly. It is difficult to keep a flame going. Mostly candles, but the furnace went out last week, and the electric is patchy. I thought it was just maintenance issues - my late husband was a good man, but he... did not like to spend frivolously. It has been a little worse since Porthos - Lieutenant Vallon - began to come for tea.”

“Yes, how is Porthos?”

“You and Lieutenant have been friends for a while now, I take it?” asked Samara.

Alice smiled with a demure twinkle. “A little while.” She looked down, stirring her tea with determination. “My sister-in-law tells me there is no such thing as ghosts and it is all flim-flam and the imaginings of hysterical women.”

Samara supposed the lady wanted reassurance. Instead she said, “Ghosts are a complicated matter for experimental theologians.” She smiled again, cat-like, and said, “There was a monograph written before the war which argued eloquently that ghosts are natural phenomena but lack sentience.”

“That was me,” Aramis volunteered, grinning sharp and bright. “I wrote that.”

“While most of us disagree with the core premise, it gives a useful perspective on how possessions happen.”

“Things echo,” Aramis said, “fragments of memory, scraps of song. Half-lines of poetry and a loved one’s favourite perfume; the curve of their hands and the emptiness when they are gone. They find the cracks in us and resound in the vaults of our hearts.”

“Can you tell me more of how you met Lieutenant Vallon?”

**^

“It's a miser-ghost,” said Aramis briskly, as they explored the upstairs rooms. “How dare my loved ones feel joy when I am gone, that sort of thing. So snuff out the candles, muffle the bells, silence all voices not raised in grief...”

“Are you still pouting about Porthos and Athos leaving?” Samara demanded. She let the teardrop silver bob of a pendulum swing from arched fingers as they prowled along a dim hallway like hunting dogs. She did not truly need it, but symbolism - the look of the the thing - was as helpful in ghost-hunting as in ladies’ fashion.

Aramis waved a dismissive hand. “‘Better place’,” he quoted lightly. “And Porthos has a heart made for breaking; he'll be back soon enough. Until then, let him enjoy his holiday out of the half-world.”

Samara decided that she believed him. Despite his occasional tincture of bitterness, Aramis never grudged another's happiness. “Just you and me, then.”

He affected a northern brogue: “Aye, ma poor wee fatherless child.”

She tutted. “Alice's crack is fear, I think. That's a new suit she's wearing, but it's coloured in half-mourning. That hint of worry about walking into the light. She wants the life and vigour -”

“And passion -”

“- That Porthos represents, but it worries her, also; it's like going to the country of your ancestors and not knowing the customs. So she lets the ghost of Mr Clerbeaux ring her, just a little.”

Aramis looked at her, eyes sharp. “Very good, Junior.” He reached a corner and paused, listening. “She seems a woman of sense and kindness; it would most likely heal on its own. But since we're here...”

“Since we're here,” Samara echoed. “Recruit him?”

Aramis tutted, “We had a miser-ghost in the department in the year five,” he said absently, listening to something beyond Samara’s senses. “It was terrible: not a hot cup of cocoa in the house.”

Sometimes she forgot just how old he was. The pendulum tugged at her fingers, swinging wildly then stopped stone dead; her breath began to steam in the suddenly chill air. “Company,” she murmured, taking a small thurible from her satchel and lighting it with a match struck on the sole of her little shoe.

He backed away from the incense, almost vanishing into the shadows. She could still see his teeth, though, very white. “On three,” the ghost said.

They swept around the corner.

***

It was a fairly traditional exorcism. Samara swung her thurible, the incense rich and heavy, and recited bible verses, carefully chosen into annoying the ghost enough that it would come out and fight. Once it did, Aramis was ready to deal with it as only another ghost could.

“... _and the fig tree putteth forth its figs. The time of the singing of birds is here. Come away…”_  

But Mr Clerbeaux had a trick up his sleeve. Thrifty, hoarding, he had ruffled through the echoes and memories that the house itself kept and found, with an unexpected genius, one of the few things that could distract the department’s best hunter.

Somewhere, there was a baby crying.

Samara’s partner turned his head.

“Aramis!”

“No, but it's...” As if of their own accord, his feet moved away, soundless. “It might be hurting. I just need to check.”

In the silence of the empty room, Samara’s thurible went out. The heavy incense, bereft of its source, began to thin, to dissipate.

She heard her own breathing, and the creak of floorboards under her shifting weight. The lights began to dim. An old man chuckled.

***

It was at times like this, as the penny dreadfuls and the theatre would have it, that a ghost hunter would display steely nerves and profound presence of mind. But the theatre believed that ghost hunters were all cerebral, monocled gentlemen, grizzled ex-soldiers with shadows in their eyes, or serene, plump women with flowered hats and bags of knitting.

That Samara was neither gentleman, nor soldier, and only faked serenity was beside the point. The theatre did not understand how the partnerships worked, and nobody, not even a very young and forthright poet, cared to enlighten them. Who, after all, wanted to advertise how very broken they were?

In the darkness Samara’s fear, and her grief, and her despair at being left alone, at being _left,_ flooded through her and she cried out like the voice of a storm, like the ringing of a great bell, “ _FATHER, DON'T LEAVE ME!_ “

Her shout echoed.

And in the darkness, out of the echo, a soft voice murmured, “I never will. Not while you need me.”

Icy, almost substantial fingers brushed at her cheeks. “You can open your eyes now. I already ate him.”

When she did, Samara realised that she was kneeling, the floorboards hard against her knees, and Aramis wrapped around her as close as a man who wasn't there could do.

“I'll be done grieving for Tariq one day,” she said, sniffing messily. “And what will you do, without me?”

“I will be very happy for you, and find another heart to ring in,” the ghost said.

“That wasn't your Anne, out the window this morning,” she said precisely, “or your _own_ child.”

“My great-greats, actually,” he said lightly. “Triple greats? I'm beginning to lose track.”  

 _“Move on,”_ ordered Samara.

“But there's always another lost child,” he said, very simply. “Shall we go down to tea? I believe the lovely widow is toasting crumpets...”

“Well of course,” said Samara tartly, “crumpets make everything better.” She allowed him to draw her to her feet, weightless hands urging her up. Through the window clouds cleared away from the sun, and the room shone all golden.

 

_There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in._

\- Leonard Cohen    

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AUs are by their nature character studies. How would X react in such-and-such crisis? What about Y can I take away and still keep her Y? What minor aspects of Z can I expand on in an interesting way?
> 
> I had to work a bit harder with Samara and Alice than I did with Sylvie, but this was still a lot of fun.
> 
> **
> 
> "Half-mourning" - clothes in lavender and/or grey, as opposed to the black of full mourning. Very old-fashioned.
> 
> Samara quoted from the Song of Solomon, a section of the Bible full of luscious, erotic imagery.


	3. "Lone Athos and Cub"

DAY EXT:  A long panning shot of scrub and desert, mesas twisted and gnarled by the wind in the background, glorious sunset colours painting the bare land.

SFX: Low wind; a high, dreary squeak; the trudge of footsteps on the gritty earth.

CUT TO: Mid shot, a distorted shadow on the ground, moving to ATHOS, a hard-bitten man muffled in a weather-beaten duster, a wide-brimmed hat, a neckerchief hiding his chin. He is pushing an old-fashioned perambulator, in which sleeps the toddler RAOUL. The shot moves to a flag carried on ATHOS’ back, which reads: “Gun for hire; Fists for hire; Son for hire;”

SFX: Horse hooves, jingling tack.

Two horsemen in rough gear with a distinctive CROW sigil painted on ride up beside him.

GUNMAN 1

You Athos?

ATHOS

I don't know, do you really think so?

GUNMAN 2

Answer the question, little man.

ATHOS

I would not want to be rude and contradict you. Besides, I might be mistaken.

GUNMAN 1

Oh, for the love of…

He pulls his gun out and clicks the hammer of his pistol. ATHOS trips, seemingly, and the shot misses him, spooking GUNMAN 2’S horse. His own pistol goes off, wild and ricocheting off the baby carriage. ATHOS dives to the ground, rolling under the carriage and pulling two guns of his own from under the chassis. Guns akimbo, he fires.

SFX: Two thuds, horses whinnying and running off.

Just like that, it's over.

CLOSE UP: RAOUL, still sleeping peacefully in the carriage: a small, plump child with hair like lambswool.  

LONG SHOT: ATHOS pushes the perambulator into the distance, a small spattering blood trail running behind him.

SFX: Squeak...

TITLE CRAWL

**L O N E   A T H O S   A N D   C U B**

 

SFX: Full orchestra, heavy on the strings, stirring trumpets…

**

In the comfortable dim light of the Lamplighter Saloon, Alice polished the long wooden bar and eyed her waitresses, young Fleur and Therese, straighten the chairs in the midafternoon lull - after the siesta, before the evening rush.

The sheriff, Marcheaux, leaned on the bar and watched them thoughtfully himself. “It's not right,” he said, “only women running this place. What’ll you do the next time a brawl stirs up, eh? Best to scotch these problems before they start. Get a man to stick around, tamp down on the trouble.”

Alice smiled non-committally, her pearl eardrops swinging from her earlobes. Marcheaux’s hard, handsome face looked almost vulpine in the light. She declined to ask if he was volunteering as the Steadying Male Influence. She poured him another whisky, on the house, for it did not do for a pragmatic business woman to irritate the local law enforcement, and then said, “Didn't I hear the Mayor calling for you at the mill opening?” He straightened slightly, the flirtatiousness gone, and left, with the confident swinging stride of one who owned the earth, or at least this part of it. The saloon half-doors swung.

She shook her head, and reached under the bar, where dwelt a very ancient bell-mouthed bazooka by the name of Cleopatra, some barrels of dubious whisky, proclaiming itself ‘Glenlivvet’, and a grey cat and her three blind kittens, as yet unnamed. The cat clawed her hand affectionately. The saloon doors swung again and she straightened, hiding her irritation.

But it was not Marcheaux pushing the ancient black baby carriage through the doors and casting his shadow into the room, and not Marcheaux who collapsed in an aesthetic faint on her freshly scrubbed floor. Fleur and Therese fluttered over. Alice knelt beside the unconscious man, gently turning him over to see the stain of red on his shoulder and dying his hand.

“Oh, bugger,” she said. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one wants to be a multiparter, so we'll see more when I get to it. 
> 
> “Lone Wolf and Cub” is a rather old, very good, manga series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima - I think they made some movies as well. In the spirit of Japanese historical-action stories being translated to the Wild West, I'm doing the same here. Athos’ grumpiness rather suits the role.
> 
> Athos’ dialogue was lifted from the book.


	4. "I'm Not a Villain - I Just Play One on TV"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit meta, I guess.
> 
> CW: Marcheaux, while not a card-carrying villain here, is still a shit and his language reflects that.

“How's the harem?” Marcheaux asked pleasantly.

Athos raised eloquent eyebrows behind his thick black horn rim glasses, leaning back in his wheeled and allegedly ergonomic chair. It squeaked dangerously.  

Marcheaux, who self-described as a 'professional prick', threw up his hands in apology. “My bad. I meant _coven._ ” He waggled his ginger eyebrows. “Little ladies? SOs?”

“They are having brunch,” said Athos mournfully. “With me.” There was brunch in his future, and brunch in his recent past, brief, terrifying engagements in Sylvie’s campaign of _behaving like civilised adults about all this._ He was starting to suspect that his first wife actually liked Sylvie, although that was always difficult to tell. Certainly, she'd offered to clear up any legal complications if Sylvie ever offed him in a freak stingray accident, so sad. That was affection, surely? He presumed it was a joke, also. Almost certainly.

Marcheaux tsked. “There's your problem right there: women.”

He leaned too far into Athos’ personal space, the sleeve of his leather jacket brushing Athos’ flannel-covered shoulder, and tugged the latest sheet of foolscap out of Athos’ typewriter.  

“‘LOUIS: Who's queen?’”

It was pipe-cleaner writing only, meant only to ease Athos through a (barely there) stall in the scripts for the next block of filming, not at all for an actor's eyes godammit.  

“Hm, pithy, but your audience may recognise the source...” Athos snatched the paper back.  

_“Why are you here?”_

“You write better lines when you're angry. Villains with good lines make it to the next season. QED.”

“You're betting that my… irritation will not extend to killing off your character off-camera, unfulfilled, and in an embarrassing way.”

Marcheaux smirked. “That would be unprofessional.”

It was perhaps true that Athos’ writing was suffering. He remembered long nights after the divorce, divided in equal measure between black coffee, bad liquor, and the biting satire on his pages. He couldn't quite summon up the rage anymore. Was this what happiness was supposed to feel like? The slow theft of the anger and hurt, until he could look at Anne over a carafe of orange juice with something resembling equanimity as she poured Sylvie’s tea just the way the younger woman liked it?

Athos refused to believe that everything good about his craft came from personal wretchedness.  

“How's your worse half?” he asked, watching Marcheaux’s face.

“Oh, plotting to bring down Parliament,” he answered with a vulpine grin. “The usual.” But his fingers played with the keys on his chain. _Liar,_ thought Athos _._   

All writers were thieves. When they weren't dripping pieces of themselves onto the page they were stealing parts of other people - a scrap of witty banter polished up and placed in a jewelled setting, the knuckles of an old woman's hands curved around a teacup as she heard of her grandson's death, a thousand-thousand what-ifs culled from random events and happenstance. He knew that this conversation would, somehow, end up in a script - there was too much hay to be made from Marcheaux’s sharp-edged belligerence and performative pragmatism. He would steal this piece of Marcheaux, some day.

A trill of bells from the pocket of Marcheaux’s jeans, and Athos watched the actor's hard face grow even harder as he listened to the voice on the phone. He thumbed it off. "You," he said, standing over Athos, "have a car on the lot. Faster than a cab. Come."

And Athos did, trotting through the halls in scuffed trainers and navigating the horrors of rush hour traffic, nearly sideswiping a lorry in his yellow mini as he turned into the hospital parking lot because he was stealing peeks at his passenger during the turn.

And he didn't do it, he knew, because he liked Marcheaux, or for simple human decency. He did it so that he could watch Marcheaux’s cocksure stride echoing on the lino of the Oncology Ward as nurses glared at him with well-worn loathing, and see the gentleness of Doctor Lemay's dark eyes as he discussed Mr Feron's case with his next-of-kin. He did it to see that stolen, vulnerable look on Marcheaux’s face, so that he could store it away to make more fiction.

 _Athos,_ he thought to himself, _you utter bastard._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does anyone not believe Marcheaux was in love with Feron? Lemay got shafted for lines here, sorry about that. (Just... the _look_ on Marcheaux’s face when Feron makes that crack about the infirmary. I had to use it.)
> 
> While I have no canonical evidence to suggest that Milady and Sylvie would get along if given a chance, I do like the idea.
> 
> “Who's queen?” - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0xEFoI2JgSc
> 
> I borrowed screenwriter!Athos' clothes from Tom Burke's look in the walk through he does of the costume department.


	5. "Sir Constance and the Red Lady"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plot strongly influenced by Gawain and the Green Knight. I'm sorry, I'm just not good enough to emulate the verse of it, so a modern prose retelling will have to do. There are a few touches from the general Arthurian Mythos.

_the lady of the house_

 “I should... probably be back on my quest. I can't meet the Giant Grimaud if all I do is lie a-bed all day!”

“Oh, but stay, my brave knight. You were so exhausted by the terrible weather when you stumbled in our gates last night, I scarce thought I could get your armour off. No. I won't hear of it. You shall avail yourself of our hospitality and when the time comes my husband shall lead you to where you need to go.”

“But -”

“It will not be any trouble at all. I only hope I can keep you entertained.”

Constance, when she had taken on the grave, solemn, and joyful duties of knighthood, had been carefully instructed by her seniors. It was not just skill-at-arms that made a Knight of the Fleur-de-lis, said melancholy Sir Athos, but a sense of justice. Guarding the people both high and low, added large, jovial Sir Porthos. And supreme courtesy in all things, said the knight famed for his charm.

“All things?” Constance had asked nervously. “Even -”

 _“All things,”_ Sir Aramis pronounced direly, before taking her out drinking.

It was discourteous to leap out of bed bare-arse naked, even in front of another woman, and discourteous to order a lady out of a chamber in her own house. The Lady of Castle-Rouge seemed oblivious to Constance’s hinting about going on with her day, and remained seated in her high-backed chair, her dark hair braided in a long loose rope over her fair shoulder and her green eyes kitten-wide. She seemed so very starved for company, the poor lonely soul stranded out here in the wilderness, and she asked such sweetly innocent questions.

Constance was… brutally aware of the softness of the fur blanket against her bare breasts.

The Red Lady turned her head suddenly as she gave a chirruping whistle in imitation of the marvellous birds that dwelt near her home, and the braid of hair - combed with perfumed oil, braided loose enough that one might very carefully sink one's fingers into it and lift it to one's lips - slipped off the curve of her shoulder.

Constance whimpered.

“Oh my, does your wound trouble you?” the Lady asked. “I have an unguent for that.”

“I'm fine,” Constance assured her hurriedly. “Quite well,” she squeaked.

It was going to be a very long day.

 

 

_a grey and stony silence_

The Chapel-Rouge was a bare place, of tumbled grey stone and scrubby grass poking out of icy slush. Here and there grew rowan trees, their berries a bright blood red, the only colour in the drearness of the day. Constance suspected that it had been a holy place long before the chapel was built and would be when the last of its walls had broken and fallen. The roof was already gone, the bare altar open to the sky.

Constance had hitched her dappled grey warhorse to a nearby post and, though her armour weighed heavy on her shoulders, hung her sword belt off the pommel of the saddle.

The Giant Grimaud, clad in vermillion armour, swung his great sword low to the ground, his grim, scarred visage almost serene. The rings on his fingers glittered.

“No blindfold!” said Constance, silently cursing the wobble in her voice. She had come a long way to kneel here amongst the stone and the rowan trees. Her hair was braided and pinned around her head in a crown for the pride of it, and the courtesy. She bent her head and bared her neck.

The sword swung. She felt the breeze against the back of her neck; the steel lifted away.

“Why did you come?” the giant asked, without much interest.   

“To keep a vow,” Constance gritted. The sword swung again. He was playing with her. She had not played, a year ago, when Grimaud had strode into the King's Hall and challenged him to a contest of bravery. She, the newest of King Louis’ knights had put herself forward as champion. And why had she done that - bravery? She did not feel brave now. An excess of spirit from her recent vigil? The instinct to throw herself between the King and fair Queen, and what boded magic and wonder and _death_  come in with the storm through the great doors? Was it that she thought of herself as a sacrifice, something to be thrown into the fire that her betters might walk free of the toils of this terrible plot? Or was it overweening pride that pricked her to stand up for the giant’s beheading game?

She hadn't thought much at all, in that bright-dark moment, slicing the giant's head off his shoulders in one easy movement. She'd thought less when, heartless, he had stood up and placed it back on his shoulders and told her to meet him in a year for the return blow.

She'd thought too much, travelling to get here.  

The next strike sent a line of fire across the back of her neck; she felt the blood trickling down, cold in the wind.

“Enough games. Do it!”

“I'd been hoping to hear you beg but not... quite like this,” a low warm voice said, and the Lady of Castle-Rouge walked into view, then circled around. She seemed vaguely disappointed. Constance tightened her jaw and turned to watch.

The Lady broke a wand from a rowan tree and struck the Red Knight across the back of his knees. He stiffened and froze where he stood. In the sudden wind that blew up his red armour seemed to lose its vermillion hue, fading to the duller red of autumn leaves which peeled and whirled away with the bustling air leaving only a skeleton of woven twigs and branches, which themselves fell and scattered to the stony ground.

“How do you kill something without a heart?” she said lightly.

Struggling to one knee Constance gasped, “Why?”

A flicker of… something… crossed the Red Lady's face. “It's complicated,” she said. She lifted a strand of Constance's red-brown hair, blown loose from its crown, and rubbed it lightly between her fingertips. “So pretty,” she said. And, “I like you. Perhaps you should come home with me; I'll tell you a story.”

Constance realised she was leaning into the Lady's warmth.

With a scurry of hooves, a hind, white with red ears, ran through the clearing that held the Chapel. Then a pack of hunting dogs with slavering mouths. Then three horses, with a man on each one, tossed half naked on their bellies over the saddles and securely bound, their backs bloody from a whipping.

In the third, Constance recognised the face of her missing squire, d'Artagnan, his tan face taut with pain and exhaustion.

“Oh… _hell!”_ said Constance.

“I'd advise you to stay here,” said the Lady, sweet and bitter as wild honey.

Constance surged to her feet, grabbing up her sword belt and seizing the reins of her tired grey horse.

“I'm sorry I'll come back!” she yelled. “I promise!”

The Lady watched her ride out of sight. A small pebble slipped under her foot and skittered down the path.     

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Afterwards, Sir Aramis needed to hear about the encounter with the Red Lady in great detail, so he could give suitable advice, well considered, in case something like that should ever happen again.


	6. "Samara, A Novel"

"Samara, A Novel"

 

In a small seaside village there once lived a young lady of unbalanced sensibility.

Wallerick-by-the-Sea was not far from the celebrated watering hole of Brighton and its sea-breezes were as healthful, its sea-views as dramatic, and its sea-fishers as stoically picturesque, yet the roads were bad and the Prince Regent had taken against it some years ago - a matter of an aged grandmother insulting his horse, Samara believed, though the details of what precisely had been said to the corpulent monarch varied with the teller. And so Wallerick languished, inhabited by the less-than-affluent, the unfashionable, and those who would like to live very much _away_ from public comment.

Miss Samara and her father, the redoubtable but retired General Tariq Alaman, belonged to all three of those categories.

“The trouble,” she told her largest, fattest cat, Butterscotch, “is that here we are too Spanish, and At Home we are not Spanish enough.” Butterscotch did not answer, engrossed as he was in the examination and hygiene of his left paw. His cousin, lithe grey Fantomas, appeared between the panes of the half-open window, chirruping around the grey mouse in his mouth.

Samara was aware that the appropriate response to a mouse was to wail and stand on a table. But her sensibility was tucked into inappropriate areas. This was her second problem.

The third problem was money, the General her father's funds slowly dwindling. They eked them out with careful householding and the occasional scientific monograph he managed to publish, despite his lack of entrance to the Royal Society or any useful patron. An increasing amount of their finances came, however, from the packages wrapped in brown paper sent to and from a small office in London.

Samara was considering adding a fourth problem to her lot, in the form of a small child currently sitting with his feet tucked under him like a tailor on her favourite rug. The russet-haired little boy was considerably drier than when she had found him in the small hours of the night, pacing in an artistic melancholy along the seashore. _She_ had been pacing that is; the boy had been silent and still, wrapped in canvas in the hollow of a beached rowboat, the pilot of the boat unable to comment on this situation, being himself recumbent, repining, and dead, his limp arm trailing in the water like seaweed, the other clutched around a bloodstain like a midnight flower on his ghostly shirt. Snatching the child, Samara had bundled him under her cloak and taken him home, heart racing, and then dried him off, fed him, and given him a bed for the night.

“And what shall we do with you, eh?”

The child ate his marmalade and toast in sticky and dignified silence.

Samara looked at him steadily.

Children were not her area of expertise, and, having resigned herself to a placid and bookish spinsterhood, she had not thought to study them. If she had known, if only she had known what the next eleven days would bring her, the alarums and excursions, the screams, smugglers, spies, and magnificent army lieutenants presenting themselves on her doorstep - the moment of storm - she might perhaps have expected a glint of apology from the young boy.

But he was a child. He didn’t know.

“I'm going to read now,” she told the little boy. “If you decide to cry? Please, do it quietly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wallerick-by-the-Sea doesn't actually exist, though I adapted its name from a real resort.
> 
> This kinda wants to be longer, so we'll see what happens by the way of handsome Lieutenants Vallon and Herblay investigating the scene at some point.
> 
> Feels good to knock out something short, though!

**Author's Note:**

> I drew the names at random, twice, to get the cast for each AU. While I'm allowed other characters, these are the mains. Hmm, some could be challenging. 
> 
> ~~Ghost Cops - Aramis, Samara, Alice~~  
>  Ghost Sitcom - Flea, Rochefort, Bonnaire  
> Space Pirates! - Richelieu, Feron, Elodie  
>  ~~Arthurian Romance - Grimaud, Milady, Constance~~  
>  Play (Shakespeare or otherwise) - pastiche - Sylvie, Ninon, Porthos  
>  ~~Actors and Playwrights - Athos, Marcheaux, Lemay~~  
>  Film Noir - Louis Sr., Charon, d'Artagnan  
> Magical Realism - Queen Anne, Tariq, Juliet of Episcey  
>  ~~Regency Romance - Louis Jr., Tariq, Samara~~  
>  Superheroes! - Queen Anne, Richelieu, Aramis  
> World WarI/II - Elodie, Feron, Bonnaire  
> La Boheme/La Traviata/Demimonde - Constance, Milady, Grimaud  
>  ~~Tournament - Sylvie, Ninon, Porthos~~  
>  ~~Yojimbo/Magnificent 7 etc. - Alice, Athos, Marcheaux~~  
>  Spy Hunt - Charon, d'Artagnan, Lemay  
> Pirates! - Louis Sr., Juliet, Rochefort, Flea


End file.
